IRONSCALES alternatives and competitors

We needed it for mail relay and phishing awareness training.

We use the IRONSCALE solution on all our email platforms, including mobile apps, web access, and Outlook on computers.

Our deployment model is hybrid. Our private environment is in Microsoft 365 and we also have SaaS through BDO.

Since we are using Microsoft 365 and everybody is basically connected to that infrastructure for their emails, all we had to do was implement IRONSCALES into 365 and that covered my whole organization. There are about 175 email boxes. We expect that to at least double that amount in the next couple of years

There is buzz around phishing awareness training. When I make a campaign, all of a sudden people in our organization are talking, thinking, and wondering about it. Therefore, it keeps people on their toes. That is perfect because it does exactly what we want it to do. 

Everything seems fine with the mail relay. I can't complain.

Monthly, we have been using the campaigns. Besides that, the actual work that it does as a mail relay, protecting our email infrastructure, is valuable. Also, the ease of integration into Microsoft 365.

The artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities of the solution are very important because we don't know what we don't know. The fact that I can use the community for artificial intelligence based on other case studies is perfect. Why not learn from other people's experience?

We use the AI to determine if an email is phishing or dangerous.

For email security effectiveness, I would give it 8 out of 10. As far as the mail relay is concerned, we haven't had major attacks, concerns, or phishing emails. So, we can't complain. Thank God everything has been working fine, but we never really tested IRONSCALES to its fullest. We have been using its automatic features where it gives me advice that some email might be phishing and so on. As for that, it does work really well. However, I can't tell you that it is battle-tested. That is why I am not giving it more than 8.

As far as training awareness, I would give it 6.5 to 7 out of 10. In regards to phishing awareness training, I have been having some issues with the Hebrew aspects of IRONSCALES since most of our company's employees need the Hebrew language, and the phishing awareness in Hebrew is so-so. In addition, the biggest problem that I have is with people who fail since most of them just don't do the training, and IRONSCALES doesn't have some sort of reminder feature.

When someone fails, if they open up the email and push on the link, then they get to a dedicated website which is supposed to give them basic information, e.g., what they could have noticed, then some sort of link to an instructional video, and in the end, training. I just noticed that 95% of the people who click on the email are flunking. For the awareness training, they don't continue to watch the video or do the training. Instead, they just exit the screen and move on.

I would like it if IRONSCALES had some sort of reminder mechanism, meaning IRONSCALES knows if a user completed the training or not. As long as it hasn't been completed, it keeps reminding every so often, alerts the manager, etc. Right now, it is all in the hands of the employee, and not all of them continue the process, which is a shame.

I would like to have more of an ability to intervene in the landing page for phishing awareness, e.g., more design options, change logos, color, and fonts. Right now, it is a template.

We have been using IRONSCALES since February 2022.

I would rate the stability as 10 out of 10. It is always up and running. I have never seen downtime.

It requires someone from my help desk team to keep watch on the logs and see if there are any alerts or events. Besides that, there isn't much maintenance.

It seems to me that it is really easy to scale up or down, meaning I just need to add licenses. 365 is already implemented. So, as long as I just add email boxes, they are automatically within the system. Therefore, I just need to be up to par as far as licenses are concerned. It scales within seconds.

Since I have it as a SaaS, I never really need to talk to IRONSCALES. I just talk to BDO who just does whatever needs to be done. I would rate the support from BDO as nine out of 10.

Positive

My organization didn't use another solution before IRONSCALES.

The initial setup was straightforward. It took 10 minutes and then the product was up and running.

It provides an easy installation. It is a matter of minutes, which makes a big difference. Imagine the difference if you had to install a server or physical product. This solution is all software.

We started as a PoC. We implemented IRONSCALES as a trial version into our 365. From that point, we purchased it, then it became a non-evaluation version.

The deployment took one person and someone from IRONSCALES.

We realized the solution's benefits within the PoC.

IRONSCALES has enabled us to spend more time on other activities because it is just install and forget. Our main goal was not to deal with it, meaning I can implement it and it does what it's supposed to do without a lot of intervention on our side unless some sort of case or event happens. That is exactly what it did. I have a fully functioning mail relay that basically takes care of itself. Obviously, we have to view all the logs and everything, and that is something our SOC also does. It just takes a burden off my shoulders. I can let it run.

If we can prevent a phishing attack or ransomware attack, then the ROI will be immense. At this point in the game, when everything is okay, I can't really see an ROI. However, when time comes, it will be there.

They are pretty much the same as all the other competitors in the market.

There is an installation cost. Since we have this as a managed service, we pay for licensing and the managed service itself. Other than that, there are no additional costs.

We were looking for some sort of platform that we could use to do phishing awareness training. We were looking into Cisco and different solutions. Eventually, we came upon IRONSCALES because we also needed a mail relay. This actually gave us both solutions in the same spot.

We evaluated Cisco's trainee portal and Fortinet FortiMail. In the end, we went with IRONSCALES because it was both products in one solution. Another reason being that we wanted a managed solution. Our provider in Israel, BDO, is an official retailer of IRONSCALES. They work with IRONSCALES and offer this service as a service. Therefore, we got a managed IRONSCALES solution.

Microsoft 365 offers standard anti-phishing functionality, but nothing beyond that.

Try it. It takes seconds.

I would rate the product as nine out of 10.

It is a glorified email spam filter. IRONSCALES catches whatever the built-in Microsoft spam filter doesn't catch. Its intelligence is different. Microsoft spam filters are only strong to a certain extent, and IRONSCALES catches what falls through the cracks, which is super important. It checks the links and other things, and our mailboxes are much cleaner.

Every company is different. In our company, it is helpful because it lets people know what to look out for. The reason we got IRONSCALES was that you can train all day long, but not everyone is going to get it. That's just the nature of working in the industry. It helps to remind people from time to time, but the scams evolve, and IRONSCALES has also evolved. So, the training is much less important than it used to be in terms of how to determine what's what in the malicious message, whether it is phishing, etc.

Its artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities are the most important pieces. It is just good to know that it is watching when we don't have to watch. I can go to sleep, and it is still working. The AI knows what to pick up on. It learns from other companies. The key is that it is not just our tenants that it is examining; it is examining all the tenants. So, it can take what it learns from a different company that has nothing to do with us and apply it to our mailbox. So, the whole system gets smarter overall.

It provides the ability to customize the automated detection capabilities. The system is set up for that when you start, and there is not a whole lot of going back in and reteaching it after the fact. Only when we're doing the training, to teach people what to look out for, we intentionally do white list certain messages that are designed to be spammed. This way we can go back, look and find out which employees need a refresher on how to find a malicious email because they opened the wrong email or clicked the wrong link. That's the only time that we would go and update anything. Most of the time you leave it alone.

It enabled us to spend more time on other activities. Previously, when we had very strong spam filters, a lot of things were positive. It took a lot of digging. Every time somebody would send an email saying that they are missing something, we'd have to go back and release it. IRONSCALES doesn't do that. The messages that are legit go through because the false positive rate is very low. It seems to catch real problems, and it lets the clean ones through, which is what it is supposed to do. The only time we have an issue is when people word an email poorly, it might be considered a SPAM message, whereas it is not. It is legit. In such a case, I just have to release it, and it is fine. 

The fact that it is set-and-forget is valuable. Once you turn it on, you very rarely have to micromanage it, whereas, with a lot of spam filters, you have to go in very often. 

Its nicest feature is that other users in our company can flag something as spam, and it'll automatically flag it for everybody else in the company. It'll pull that out of your mailbox before it becomes an issue. This way 50 people don't get the same notice. One person clicks it, and it automatically goes away. 

Its UI could be improved. My pet peeve with a lot of these cloud-based systems is that a lot of times, the interface for the management is a little clunky. If you live and breathe IRONSCALES all day long, you'll obviously know where everything is just from muscle memory, but the system is not designed for people to be in it all day long. You're only supposed to occasionally look at it. When things get moved around, it is not necessarily that intuitive. I'm an IT guy, and I can pretty much take the worst UI and figure it out, but the menus and the options in the interface could be a little cleaner graphically. If you have a quick problem that you want to resolve, it takes a little bit of digging in the admin console, whereas it should take a few clicks up front. That's about it, and that's a superficial issue. I understand that it is difficult to refine when you have a lot of information to deliver. It is not an easy job. Microsoft gets it wrong too.

We went live at the very beginning of this year, but we started using it before that. We had a tenant change in our Microsoft system. So, we waited, and then at the very beginning of this year, we cut over to a new hosted email platform.

It just works. We haven't had any outages. 

We have a Microsoft Office 365 tenant. In that tenant, there are multiple domains or multiple companies with multiple employees. We don't discriminate or distinguish between the two. We simply apply IRONSCALES to the tenant, and it grabs all the accounts regardless of the domain they are associated with. We don't have anybody who is not being protected. We did not granularly decide who gets what. It was a very simple, shotgun approach. We have one tenant, and we have one IRONSCALES that fits in the tenant, and that was it. We did not decide to tailor it in any particular way.

It is easy to scale. When we grow, it grows with us, and if we run out of seats, I just call our customer service rep and say that we added 10 more people, and we need 10 licenses. It is that simple.

Their service is great. We have a customer service representative. I know they have a tech team, but we haven't really had any tech questions for them since we did the deployment. 

For any random question that comes up, I'll just fire off an email to our rep who can decide whether to open up a ticket with their tech team or not. Usually, it is very quickly resolvable just with our customer service representative before it requires opening a ticket. I don't have to open tickets or get a call, which is super helpful for me. I can just shoot a quick email, and they take care of it, and it is done. They can almost be my IT department. 

I would rate their service a 10 out of 10. They are friendly and responsive.

Positive

We had Cyren previously. Cyren is great. We routed all of our messages through Cyren first, and it would flag everything, and then it would release whatever we wanted into the mailboxes. The problem was that if we found something that was spam, it was too late to release. IRONSCALES sits in the tenant. It'll pull messages out of the inbox. So, even if something made it through the first time, we can recall it. Instead of tightening up the filter and hoping nothing gets through, with this solution, even if something gets through, after we determine that something is bad, we can remove that. If somebody didn't check their messages today, and we had a spam message, by the time they get to the office, it is gone. It is not sitting in their inbox waiting. That was the major reason. It can pull out even old messages that are in their box, which is very good. It is like a housekeeping service.

Our email provider supplies anti-phishing functionality, but we went with IRONSCALES because Microsoft's spam filtering isn't as sophisticated. It is very clunky to use, and it wasn't available at the time when we signed up with IRONSCALES. Because of the AI of IRONSCALES, it is much easier to look through it, whereas Microsoft's anti-spam Defender filter is a work in progress, and they change its branding all the time. It was easier for us to stick to one that we knew would double-check and catch whatever slips through the cracks of Microsoft. Microsoft doesn't have AI, and they're not necessarily using group analysis. It is only based on whatever its filters think is good or bad. So, I just didn't trust it. I trusted IRONSCALES a little more.

It was very simple. There were a few basic steps, and that was it. When you log into the IRONSCALES site, you set up your tenant, and you set up your domain. After that, you just have to authorize the bot in your mail tenant. Once that's done, it automatically scans your tenant for applicable mailboxes, and you tell it what you want it to do. That's it.

There are five steps to the whole process. The trickiest one is making sure that it has grabbed all mailboxes when it did its pass to make sure it has all the right accounts. As we add employee accounts to our system, it automatically grabs them and sets them up dynamically. So, there are no extra steps that we have to do. After a mailbox is removed from our tenant, it'll automatically get purged from IRONSCALES by itself. It doesn't require a lot of hand-holding.

I was the one who did the work with the IRONSCALES team, but technically from an invoicing perspective, IRONSCALES doesn't bill us. IRONSCALES bills our security company, and we pay the security company. I'm assuming there is some kind of revenue share.

I don't remember what they were at the time. Another security company that we work with also recommended IRONSCALES. So, with various vettings and the blessing from our third-party security consultant, it was an easy decision.

I would advise taking the time to learn about it during the installation. You shouldn't just rely on the IRONSCALES team to do it because they can do it in their sleep. The best way to learn how it works is to do the work. It is good to figure out what the menus do, what it means, and what the interface does. I know a lot of IT departments like to farm it out, but don't farm it out. Take the time to see how it is working and how you can best integrate with it. Some people just don't pay attention, but it is something to which you should pay attention.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10.